The Internal Revenue Service currently has two U.S. co-pending patent Applications entitled “Translation of Assembler Code Using Intermediary Technical Rules Language (TRL)” and “Method for Translation of Assembler to Valid Object Oriented Programming Language.”
These co-pending patent applications teach various methods and structures for translating legacy assembler computer language to an object-oriented target language using an intermediary Technical Rules Language (TRL).
IRS currently has a large inventory of legacy applications written in IBM. Recently, the IRS Enterprise Services (ES) team has developed ALC-to-Java translation tools to support the migration of the IRS Individual Master File (IMF) ALC applications to Java.
There are many challenges in translation from a machine/low-level programming language, such as ALC, to a high-level programming language like Java. Fundamentally, the coding conventions used in ALC are very difficult to grasp by developers who are trained in modern coding practices.
FIG. 1 illustrates a complex ALC control flow example. As illustrated in FIG. 1, ALC is characterized by complexities such as lack of basic conditional logic (if-then-else/loops). This emanates from non-standard subroutine linkage reflecting that some of the code was written in 1968 when no coding standards existed. ALC exhibits widespread. These and other complexities result in numerous challenges in the translation from the source language of ALC to the target language of Java.
There is an unmet need for a multi-layer computer architecture which can create ALC to Java Object Models (JOMs) capable of being directly traced back to the legacy ALC.
There is a further unmet need for a computer architecture with configured rule sets that can be reused to generate Java representations of other legacy code bases.